Himachal Govt verifying land records of Darlaghat cement plant

Solan, February 10

The state government is verifying the records pertaining to 545.14 hectare of land secured by the Ambuja Cement for the Darlaghat plant since it commenced operations in 1990s.

As per the report of revenue officials, 405.51 hectare was acquired by the state government under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, another 123.53 hectare was leased out for mining and 16.10 hectare was purchased from private landowners.

It has been learnt that the revenue officials are thoroughly verifying the records to ensure that there is no mismatch between the available details and the land purchased by the company.

The Ambuja Cement management had submitted an application in 1989 for setting up a plant at Darlaghat. It was approved by the State Level Industrial Projects and Review Authority on February 19, 1990. Initially, an amount of more than Rs 500 crore was invested for setting up the cement plant. It started the trial production in August 1995, while the regular commercial production began in September 1995.

The plant was taken over by the Adani Group in September 2022. It was unilaterally closed along with ACC Limited at Barmana on December 15, 2022, following a dispute over reduction in the freight rate.

Talks inconclusive, yet again

• A fresh round of talks was held with between the Adani Group mgmt and truckers at Darlaghat on Thursday. It, however, failed to yield any result
• Ramkrishan Sharma, member, truckers’ core committee, said the Adani mgmt wasn”t inclined to accept the two-figure freight rate and anything below that was unacceptable as they would incur losses
• He said the Adani mgmt was asking for a 30% hike in the freight proposed for multi-axle trucks after reducing it to Rs 7 per tonne per km, which belied all logic